


Inheritance

by maplemood



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Adoption, Family, Female Friendship, Force Ghosts, Gen, Ghosts, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 01:37:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14727521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maplemood/pseuds/maplemood
Summary: Beru swears she sees her in one eye’s flicker, a fraction of a moment.





	Inheritance

Traditionally, weddings on Tatooine are not just ceremonies or even celebrations but lavish, spare-no-expenses _affairs_ lasting as long as the hosts can keep the water and imported wine flowing. Festivities for her sister’s dragged on for the better part of a week; Beru knows she’s disappointing her parents, as Owen knows he is disappointing his father. But their wedding is a small one.

“This isn’t just about you,” her mother pleaded. Four days before the date she was still convinced they could rustle something up. A few barrels of spiced wine and a cheap cantina band, at least. “Think of the family name.”

Beru passed her a cup of tea. “A small ceremony was enough for Shmi.”

“That woman,” her mother said hotly, “was a _slave.”_

She took back the cup. She took the teapot, the dainty saucers of bluish cream and milk, and emptied them, one by one, into the sink. “That woman,” Beru answered, without turning around, “was like a mother to me.”

Her mother said nothing else after that.

It’s only wishful thinking, she knows, but as she and Owen recite their vows Beru swears she sees her in one eye’s flicker, a fraction of a moment. Shmi looks sturdy, as she always did. Steadfast, worn down in ways that left her warm, not hard. She stands beside Cliegg’s chair, and she smiles softly along with him. Unlike so many desert ghosts, she is at peace.

 _She had us,_ Beru thinks. Cliegg and Owen, who both adored her in their own rough, sometimes silent ways. Beru herself, who could never stop trailing after Shmi, lapping up her stories and encouragement like an eager puppy. And Anakin, her impossible boy. He came. Not in time, but he came.

_(“You’re going with him, aren’t you? Once he comes back.” After clambering halfway up the base of the tallest vaporator she wobbles, one hand outstretched to grab a fat pale mushroom the size of her fist. She’s sunburned, exhausted, sharp. Aquifer levels are dropping. It hasn’t been a prosperous year, not even a good one. “You’ll leave us.”_

_“Watch your step,” is all Shmi says. She keeps one hand planted on the small of Beru’s back, in warning as much as support. Her voice is quiet. It’s always quiet._

_“I don’t blame you,” Beru huffs. She lurches down, the mushroom clutched in her fist. It joins the small pile in their basket; sliced up and fried in butter these will be almost appetizing. “Everything on this planet is falling apart.”_

_She falters, though, when she looks up into the older woman’s face. Not that it’s changed—Shmi’s face is like her voice, soft, pleasant, revealing everything as, at the same time, it reveals nothing. A slave’s habit. Defense mechanisms worked into the muscle._

_“Tatooine’s been falling apart for longer than you’ve been alive,” she says, without judgement. She tucks a stray strand of frizz behind Beru’s ear. “But it’s my home. Always has been.”_

_“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”_

_“No harm done. I don’t know if I could leave it,” she admits. “I never did think beyond Ani coming back.” Shmi shrugs. “After that...who knows?”_

_“Who knows,” Beru echoes. She wedges the basket under one arm, linking the other through Shmi’s and hoping the woman doesn’t sense the jealousy scalding her tongue like burned soup._

_She does, of course. Shmi never fails to notice, as she never fails to be gentle about what she notices._

_“Oh, dear heart. You’re not getting rid of me that easily.” She tightens her arm to draw Beru closer. “You’d like him, and he’d like you. I know he would.”_

_“If you say so.” Beru drops her head. Her cheek resting against Shmi’s shoulder, she stares up at the dusk-dark sky. “Where do you think he is now?”)_

Anakin came, and he was everything Shmi had ever told them he would be. Strong, upright, his presence heavy with the kind of power only whispered about in the wastes. Heavy with darkness, too. Beru didn’t think much of that, not at the time. They were all too wrapped up in their own personal darknesses to bother with anyone else’s.

Three years after Shmi’s death and two years after the wedding, Kenobi brings them the baby and her heart breaks.

“Where’s Anakin?” she asks, and gets no answer but takes Luke anyway. He is, it seems, the last of the Skywalker line.

She prays Anakin is with Shmi. Wherever he is, she prays he is at peace.

Luke certainly isn’t. From the beginning he’s a restless baby, loving but never exactly cuddly. More nights than she can count Beru stays up with him, bundled in the common room behind doors barricaded against the desert night. She’s lived on a farm, under the sun and in the sand, her whole life, survived her first Tusken raid by the time she was six. Since the Raiders took Shmi, though, Beru can’t shake the feeling that she’ll die in these wastes as well. The sweeps of sand and crags of rock loom patient and hungry. Waiting.

On their wedding night, when it really hit her that they were sleeping in the bed Shmi and Cliegg used to share, she burst into tears, unable to smother them before Owen woke, sleep-tousled, begging to know, “It wasn’t that bad, was it?” He led her outside, hoping the fresh air would calm her. Yet all she felt were the biting winds, all she saw were the glints of the stars like a shine cast across some dark and awful mask. To this day, Beru’s never been more terrified.

Luke knows nothing of this. She tells him Shmi’s stories—the bright ones, the happy ones. Though she can’t feed him herself, Beru learns from her mother and HoloNet articles printed during visits to Anchorhead that skin-to-skin contact is good for babies. Some nights she unbuttons her nightgown and lets him fall asleep pillowed on her chest.

On those nights Beru lies awake, thinking back years ago. To Shmi, barely older than she is now, with a child in her belly and a transmitter in her neck and no family, no husband or lover. No one at all except for the growing baby, and that thought is all it takes to set her throat swelling and aching with how lucky she is. How lucky, despite everything, her nephew is.

_He’ll have us. He’ll have you._

There’s a reason they chose to leave him with his family name. Owen would rather have adopted Luke outright, but Beru stood firm.

_Always._

“I hope you’ll grow up strong, little man,” she whispers. She breathes in the sour-tinged, milky smell of him, kisses the soft fluff of his curls. “As strong as your grandma was.”

She dozes off not long after. Only wishful thinking, she knows, yet dreams do as dreams will, and here Shmi is, settled by her side.

 _Don’t be too hard on him, Beru,_ she says, eyes alight with love, with an understanding that sinks into Beru’s bones and almost masks the ghost’s unease. Insubstantial fingers brush through Luke’s curls, tug the blanket up from where it’s slipped around Beru’s waist. They rest for a moment, soft and cold, over her heart.  _A legacy can be a burden._


End file.
